RAID 1 Question

[MopeyMartian]

K, here's the situation...

My wife's PC (my old Dell) decided to sh*t the bed. After poking around the Dell forums it looks like the motherboard has bit the dust and PC is way out of warranty. Luckily, symptoms were sporadic at first and all essential files are backed up to this PC. *whew*

What I'd like to do is get away from Dell's proprietary hardware by getting a new case, PSU & motherboard. Do you think I'll be able to use at least 1 of the hard drives and not have to reformat everything? Would the new MB even know there was a RAID to begin with?

 

[CyberDruid]

Interesting. I have not tried to plug and play a RAID1 drive singly...only one way to find out...

 

[MopeyMartian]

Are you saying that I'll be the 1st person in history to have tried this?
Now I really feel like a pioneer!

No, for serious now. I'm dying to try this out and see what happens. If I do have to start the hard drive(s) from scratch it's not a huge deal. However, if I can just plug it in and have little or no downtime I'll be mucho happy.

I'm also worried that Dell's XP disc won't work on a "new" motherboard but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

 

[newtekie1]

I've done it before. It worked for me, though my situation was slightly different. I had an ASUS board that I was running a RAID 1 array off of, using the onboard controller. I had to reset the CMOS, and it wiped out the RAID setup. The machine still booted just fine off the single drive, without a RAID array setup. I think this working comes down to how the RAID controller works with the drive. A lot of RAID controllers, if you use identical drives in RAID 1, will simply treat them like normal drives, and just splits the I/O commands when they come, applying the same I/O command to both drives. In this case, you should be able to connect the drive by itself to any SATA controller and read the files off it.

However, your situation is different. You will most likely have to reformat regardless of it the drive would function without the RAID setup. The reason for this is that Windows will not like the swapping of the motherboard, it almost always requires a reformat when you do it.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Maybe if you had the same raid controller on the new board it might work.I doubt it though as the dell would have been an older chipset than the board you are planning to replace it with.

 

[aharvey]

The dell disc most llikely will not work on a non-dell MB without the disc image being tinkered with. i believe the bios on the dell board is what allows the dell disc to work

 

[MopeyMartian]

The dell disc most llikely will not work on a non-dell MB without the disc image being tinkered with. i believe the bios on the dell board is what allows the dell disc to work

You're probably right, but I guess I'll see what happens.
I don't really want to have to pay another $100 for the OS again.
Perhaps this will be my opportunity to try Unbuntu, but the wife might complain.

 

[AsRock]

You're probably right, but I guess I'll see what happens.
I don't really want to have to pay another $100 for the OS again.
Perhaps this will be my opportunity to try Unbuntu, but the wife might complain.

I tried it a while ago with a 4550 model and the XP CD you cannot use more than 30 days as it will not activate.

As for your question, as Tigger said if you use the same controller you might have some luck. Have any friends with a system like yours who you can trust ?. It might work as long as the new Raid controller is by the same company.

 

[CyberDruid]

This might be related. A while back I had a 3 disk RAID10 set up on my NF4 and later when I split up the disks for diffferent builds I remember the new system I built recognizing the OS on the single disk..and it booted from it...this is on a totally different controller too.

 

[MopeyMartian]

Verrrrrrrrrry interesting...

The current motherboard is 41/2 years old now. So no, the new RAID controller will not be the same (unless by some divine miracle). I guess I'm just going to have to try and see.

Of course, I could just buy a replacement board for ~$50 but that would defeat the purpose of removing as much Dell logo from my house as possible and never be stuck in this kind of bind ever again.

Thanks for the info about Dell's OS working for 30 days. I've never gotten a concrete answer from any other forums about that. Lord knows Dell would never officially comment on such a situation.

All in all, I'd like to spend <$200 on the project. Might be a little tough since my wife is into having customized toys.

 

[paybackdaman]

I am a testimonial to the Dell XP disc working on a non-Dell computer. I don't know if it is illegal to be telling you this [and if it is i'm sorry], but the only way for it to work on the non-Dell set-up is to use the Dell XP key on your old case. And if it has been 6 months since you last re-installed windows [and it sounds like you haven't re-installed windows yet] then just put in that key when it prompts it and it will work. I have 6 different computers working using the Dell XP disc.

 

[Cybrnook2002]

also, if it does boot and recognize the raid setup, you still will probably be in trouble. First, the drivers on your OS that are installed are going to load. So your OS will say wtf, this is not a P945 chipset(example), all my drivers are wron....g...blue screen. Another thing, windows has that cool little hardware change timer thing on it. Where it recognizes hardware changes it then logs it. Once this number hits a certain amount, it requires a reactivation. You could boot in safe mode, but...hmmm.....Hey you know what, we will never know if we dont try. Keep us posted.

 

[AsRock]

All so you could try is boot of another drive and see if you can get the raid show up maybe it will try repair it ?.


I had a mad time with this one a few days ago after our move. Were i turned on the PC and the raid failed as i found cables came loose. All so could not boot up at all as no system was available so i added another HDD my 160GB with OS installed on it and actually was able to repair it .

 

[MopeyMartian]

also, if it does boot and recognize the raid setup, you still will probably be in trouble. First, the drivers on your OS that are installed are going to load. So your OS will say wtf, this is not a P945 chipset(example), all my drivers are wron....g...blue screen. Another thing, windows has that cool little hardware change timer thing on it. Where it recognizes hardware changes it then logs it. Once this number hits a certain amount, it requires a reactivation. You could boot in safe mode, but...hmmm.....Hey you know what, we will never know if we dont try. Keep us posted.

I read that after replacing the motherboard I might have to run the Repair option from the XP CD. Wouldn't be so bad if I had to do that. I'm not sure if I even want to keep the RAID going at this point. Now that we have 2 PCs and large flash drives backing up data isn't as much of an issue for me as it used to be. Perhaps I'll start a NAS with the 3rd drive.

I once had the same loose SATA cable issue (awful plug design). After poking around inside and a couple reboots the controller repaired the RAID, even though all the data hadn't physically changed on the drive. Took hours to repair but at least I could use everything.

Now I just have to figure out what case, PSU, motherboard and CPU cooler to get.

 

[Cybrnook2002]

sure, but the repair option does not uninstall drivers it just replaces necessary system files that become corrupted or deleted. Like for example, when you first install XP you go through the blue screen at the beginning when you boot into the cd. Then if you watch the bottom of the screen it rolls through a ton on different files it copies into memory for the install. Those are the files it can replace. I mean the XP install discs are what 6 -7 years old. Hows is it going to be able to repair drivers and software that came out this and last year ? not gonna work

 

[MopeyMartian]

I've purchased the pieces...

for you to witness today.

Case: Antec Three Hundred

Motherboard: Foxconn P965

Power Supply: Antec Earthwatts 380W

CPU Cooler: Xigmatek HDT 120mm

What I already have to work with is:
P4 3.2GHz
4, 512MBs sticks of DDR2 533 (hopefully all compatible)
90 Gig Maxtor SATA 1.5
DVDRW & CDRW drives IDE
Creative X-Fi Xtremesomethingorother
D-link wireless G NIC

So let me know what you think. I tried to select solid components while keeping my cost down. Hopefully, with that motherboard I have some room for at least a couple future upgrades.

 

[MopeyMartian]

Thx for all the feedback...

Anyway, I did it! ...and then quickly decided that reformatting would be good for it anyway.

First, I followed some advice that I found on Dell forums, specifically the repairing Windows idea that ManyDimensions wrote about. This did work, up until Windows setup hit the 34 minutes left mark.

After may reboots and a little frustration I found the answer online Here & Here. Windows was getting hung up on the cdrom.inf file so I deleted it (knowing this would cause a problem or 2 later). Rebooted again and it was still freezing at 34 minutes. While it was frozen I noticed that my mouse+keyboard were still working so I hit Shit+F10 and somehow that was the push the system needed to finish the repair.

After getting past that hurdle I had some more issues with Windows freezing ~1 minute after the desktop loaded. With so many new devices it must of been unhappy. I still persisted and kept rebooting. After several more attempts (1 in safe mode) it was slow to load, but it worked. It was about 80% functional and gave me another chance to backup anything I might have neglected before. I wasn't happy though. There were still driver issues, my DVDRW wasn't officially recognized, the thought of manually removing everything Dell oriented was a nightmare and Windows just wanted to be verified.

So it's reformatting now...

So YES, it does work if you have 7 hours to fiddle with it (not exaggerating) and forgot to backup important files. However, if you have all your ducks in a row it's probably just easier to start from scratch (though I hate doing Windows update).

On a side note:
I'm not setting up the RAID again. I've partitioned the 100GB drive so that once and for all I can give Umbuntu a try and finally get some Linux experience under my belt as well. I'll use the 160GB drive later for a NAS or something.